City Commission Joint Workshop with Beach Business Improvement District Advisory Committee on 2023-09-19 at 11:30 am

meeting

Fort Lauderdale City Commission 24 min 3 speakers 8 agenda items transcribed 3 days ago official recording ↗

▲ 0

Transcript

jump: agenda · speakers · find in transcript

Transcript

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Why does the meeting start with a quorum check and who are the attendees?

Dean Trantalis 0:00

Good morning, everybody,

Pamela Beasley-Pittman 0:01

and welcome to the

Dean Trantalis 0:01

City Commission joint workshop with the Beach Business Improvement District. Madam Chair, would you like to call the role of your committee? Could you put your microphone on, please? Just push that button.

Unknown 0:16

Thank you. Stuart Levy, Samuel Firstman, Fernando Calvo, Steve Zunt, Mike Fleming, Michael Monroe, Myself, I'm here, Lisa.

Lisa Namur 0:32

Present.

Unknown 0:33

Rizwan. And Lori.

Lisa Namur 0:37

Here.

Dean Trantalis 0:39

Okay, you guys don't have a quorum though, do you? Do you have a quorum?

Unknown 0:45

Yeah, we do, there's five of us. No, there's four of us.

Dean Trantalis 0:48

We're missing one.

Unknown 0:55

Yeah, there are eight members, active members, so there's no quorum.

Dean Trantalis 1:00

Okay, that's all right. We can still have a discussion.

Unknown 1:04

Yes, thank you for

Dean Trantalis 1:05

that. So good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here today. We really appreciate it. And so tell us, Mr. City Manager, what's on the agenda for our workshop today?

Greg (Unknown) 1:19

Sure, so we have Ingrid here that's been working with the bid. This is an opportunity to discuss long-term goals, vision, and also an opportunity to just highlight perhaps some of the opportunities that exist on the horizon and to speak it out here in the open.

Dean Trantalis 1:37

Okay, very good. So the floor is yours.

Unknown 1:39

Thank you. And there is a PowerPoint, so you'll be able to follow. But first of all, Mayor Quintales and everyone else, thank you for meeting with us today. I'm just going to introduce myself and just tell you a little bit about what I do for my full-time job. I'm general manager of the W Fort Lauderdale and been on the bid for eight years and chair for the past three years. And I'll have my colleagues up here also introduce themselves.

Mike Fleming 2:05

Mike Fleming, General Manager of the Courtyard, Fort Lauderdale Beach. Been on the bid for six, going on seven years now, and co-chair currently.

Lisa Namur 2:16

Lisa Namur, General Manager for Bahia Mar. I've been on the bid for eight years.

Lori Johnson 2:23

And I'm Lori Johnson, Director of Sales and Marketing at the Westin Fort Lauderdale Beach and the New Kempton Shore Break, which is kind of behind us. I've been on the bid for five years.

What are the long‑term goals and vision of the Beach Business Improvement District?

Dean Trantalis 2:34

very nice um so why don't you begin your

Unknown 2:38

presentation so we want to start with just letting you know and i'm sure you all do know but the bid was created in 2006 the last meeting that we had with the city commission was 2017 and we will update you on some history so what took

Dean Trantalis 2:52

us so long

Unknown 2:56

Yes,

Dean Trantalis 2:57

thank

Unknown 2:59

you. And we're also going to discuss the alignment between the City Commission and the bid. I want to make it clear today that we are not discussing the bid expansion. There is a meeting to discuss that on October 3rd. Okay. A little bit of history, as I mentioned. Establishing Fort Lauderdale Beach as a premier resort destination, specifically increasing tourism in our area, is really one of our main purposes. Expanding business revenue and increasing economic growth, developing pedestrian-friendly sidewalks, creating a unique sense of place for visitors to enjoy, and improving the overall image of the beach. April of 2022, we had a great strategic meeting and came up with the bid goals. As you can see on there, continue to promote the district, keep current events that benefit the businesses and promote the beach as a destination, attract new events, attract additional complementary businesses to the beach, more activities, initiatives in the summer, as that is the hotel industry's low season, and explore expanding the bid, as I mentioned earlier, which we will discuss in October.

Unknown 4:11

So some progress that we made since the September meeting or since the April meeting is we revised the grant funding application and it is available for you at your leisure but the process was not very clear and it made it for lengthy meetings and really no guidelines for people presenting for budgets and therefore we created a great funding application process that has been streamlined for efficiencies. We procured foot traffic data software to track impact and outcomes of events to ensure alignment with the BID's goals to benefit the businesses and to promote the beach, and engage a consultant, again, to have that feasibility study done to expand.